TECH - Tesla to Trucking Industry: Step Up Your Electric Game | Benzinga
The ACT Expo has outgrown the art deco charm of Long Beach and the "Disney-fied" atmosphere of Anaheim, California. This year, it moved to convention mecca with exhibitors filling the North Hall of the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center. It returns to Anaheim in 2025, occupying both halls of the convention center in 2025.
Dozens of battery electric, fuel-cell electric and alternative fuel vehicles attracted long lines for short rides. For the first time, the pacesetter in electric vehicle technology — Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) — was among them.
The Tesla Semi was available for short rides at the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Las Vegas. (Photo - Alan Adler/FreightWaves)
Perhaps because Tesla has some early points on the board with its Semi electric truck, Elon Musk dispatched his top Semi executive with a message for legacy truck makers: "Get with it."
Semi's top executive comes to town
Dan Priestley is not exactly a household name. But given that he works for a company whose CEO is the focal — and only — regular point of communications, that's not a surprise. Public relations is not an afterthought at Tesla. It doesn't really exist.
So, having Priestley participate in a fireside chat at the ACT Expo highlighted four days that also featured a first-ever gathering of five legacy trucking leaders on the same stage with a moderator asking tough questions that allowed little self-promotion to seep through.
But back to Priestley. His best line about the Semi, now in early production with fewer than 100 trucks in customer use, smacked of the kind of self-deprecating humor that wins over an audience.
"Tesla has a specialty. And that is turning the impossible into merely late" Priestley said. The reference, of course, was to the September 2017 reveal of the Semi being followed by multiple delays that pushed its arrival five years beyond its original 2019 planned production date.
Semi is the only purpose-built electric truck
Only Tesla is manufacturing a purpose-built electric truck. As such, it is lighter and capable of handling a much higher electric charge than entries from Daimler Truck, Volvo Group North America, Paccar, Navistar and a host of startups. All started by replacing a diesel-power internal-combustion engine with an electric powertrain, carrying over designs never intended for powering by batteries.
Today's first- and second-generation Class 8 zero tailpipe-emissions electric trucks top out at a single-charge driving range of 200 to 300 miles, often less. They work for regional and short-haul routes but are impractical for over-the-road driving because they need hours to recharge.
The Tesla Semi is different. Its first customer, PepsiCo, ran more than 1,000 miles with one of its three Tesla Semis in a 24-hour period during the North American Council for Freight Efficiency Run on Less Electric Depot demonstration last year.
The first Semi production model probably weighs in at 26,000 to 27,000 ...